8 Great French Cities That Aren't Paris

La vie en rose.

Lyon

Here's why you should go there: If you don't eat, don't go to Lyon. If you do, you'll be happy here. Outside France, Paris might be famed for its restaurants but the French themselves arguably rate Lyon even higher.

Here's what to check out: Paul Bocuse is Lyon's reigning chef-king, with his nouvelle cuisine palace l'Auberge du Pont de Collonges just outside the city. If that sounds a little intimidating, the 89-year-old also runs four more casual Lyon brasseries – Le Nord, l'Est, Le Sud and l'Ouest – each specialising in a scrumptiously different regional cuisine.

Not sitting at all obviously with this hallowed foodie rep is the Nuits Sonores spring music festival that makes Lyon France's pulsating capital of electronica.

A Eurostar service now runs straight to Lyon from London.

Flickr: 125128422@N02 / Via Creative Commons

Marseille

Here's why you should go there: If Paris is a smartly dressed, faintly neurotic intellectual quipping about art, literature and experimental theatre, Marseille is stocky and muscular, with probably a sailor's tattoo or two and very good at making fish soup. The pair wouldn't get along at all at a party, but that's fine.

Here's what to check out: Must-sees on a first tour of France's second largest city include the U-shaped Old Port, suave old-world cafes clinging barnacle-like to its perimeter; the labyrinthine Pannier quarter, setting for some of France's finest detective novels; and l'Unité d'Habitation, Le Corbusier's modernist housing masterpiece in the south of the city.

And really do try the fish soup – bouillabaisse – if you go to Marseille. Complexly flavoured and seductively delicious, it's hard to think of a dish that better sums up a city than this literal melting pot.

Since 2015, you can get the Eurostar direct from London to Marseille. Yacht aside, it's by far the coolest way to arrive.

Atout France/Franck Charel

Nice

Here's why you should go there: Nice was once so popular with boater-hatted English sunseekers they named the main drag after them, Promenade des Anglais.
The soft light that bathes this Provençal city also drew artists such as Matisse, Renoir and Chagalle, and the museums dedicated to them make for transcendent gazing time.

Here's what to check out: Consider coughing up to use a private beach, where hotels lay on luxuries like hessian rugs down to the water to protect your tootsies from the scorching pebbles. if an A-lister is sprawled a few towels down from you (it is Nice, after all), don't acknowledge it in any way.

A last attraction: Nice's bric-a-brac shops. The city shows off par excellence the French genius for curating other people's possessions; you could spend your whole holiday here fossicking.

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Bordeaux

Here's why you should go there: Bordeaux's 18th-century city centre is as elegant as they come, and there's even a designer budget boutique hotel here, Philippe Starck's Mama Shelter.

Here's what to check out: Not drinking Bordeaux in Bordeaux would be like spurning sherry in Jerez or maybe a wheatgrass smoothie in San Francisco: incomplete, at the least, and possibly perverse.

If you've ever suspected the wine critics might be making it all up, come here and judge for yourself: the good stuff's cheap by the glass, and in June there's a mile-and-a-half of tasting stands at the Fête-du-Vin.

Flickr: 108661836@N08 / Via Creative Commons

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http://ift.tt/1SJlPOT Simon Busch